When sharing tabular data in text format, he always preferred TSV because commas were everywhere in the material we were working with, but tab characters were really rare.
Is there a reason why nobody uses these? Did someone work out back in the 90s they were pure evil and we've just never used them since?
Those codes were originally for just such a purpose, but as others point out there was a bootstrapping problem. At this point, if Excel doesn’t support it, it’s not going to gain traction.
There is an excellent description in "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications" by Joe Campbell.
So yes, TSV. However, I've seen TSV with spurious tabs :(
Sometimes I ended up pushing for |-delimited data. Or even fixed-width format :)